Thursday, December 31, 2009

Following up on the update to my last post, the native iPhone calendar can assign new events to a category, but only if that category is created by iCal for the Mac (or presumably Outlook) and then synched to the iPhone. If you don't use either iCal for the Mac or Outlook, no categories on the iPhone. I wonder if the rumored Apple tablet will allow category creation independently? That in itself wouldn't be enough to get me to buy a tablet, however. I just want the iPhone calendar to do it without a mind-meld with either Outlook or iCal for the Mac.

Update: Well I stand corrected! After doing a few more syncs, I was able to bring multiple calendars onto the iPhone and now can create new events using any of those calendars. This works because Google Sync is mimicking the Exchange (Outlook) protocol on its end. So it works! Categories rock!! (Just they originally did on the Palm calendar.) And yes, Windows Mobile was playing catchup.

Monday, December 28, 2009

Kudos to Nuevasync to close out the year and match the kudos I gave the company at the start of 2009. This time, Nuevasync allows Windows Mobile calendar users to assign a Google calendar to a category in their WinMo calendar, making it easy to manage multiple Google calendars in the (Windows) palm of one's hand. Let's see the iPhone do that! (It can't: the iPhone native calendar doesn't have categories.) The new Nuevasync service is $25 a year -- a fair price.

Score one for Windows Mobile ... after a verry long drought!

Update: It's true, as a commenter to this post says, that the iPhone can merge multiple Google calendars into one iPhone calendar. But the new Nuevasync also lets mobile users assign events to a particular category which then feeds back into respective category, and the native iPhone calendar (still) can't do that.

Sunday, December 27, 2009

Latest case in point: I'm preparing to attend my first Consumer Electronics Show in five years. For years, CES and similar trade shows have provided a Web-based event planner to add show activities to a personalized calendar. After selecting their events, attendees have a choice to export this calendar, purportedly to iCal format.

This I did today. But like so many other supposed iCal files, this one can't be properly imported into standard iCal-compliant calendars such as Google Calendar or Mozilla.

At least at the beginning of 2010, we have a new diagnostic tool, the iCalendar Validator. Running my exported CES file through the Validator reveals that the file scored 75 out of 100 points, accompanied by this warning: "This calendar has major problems; many applications will reject this calendar."

I would guess that one application will accept the calendar just fine: Microsoft Outlook. But looking at the text of the CES calendar, the beginning states "BEGIN:VCALENDAR BEGIN:VCALENDAR VERSION:2.0."

vCal is an older, less forgiving version of the iCal standard. It's been the topic of a long comment thread here. It's sad that organizations of the stature and importance of the Consumer Electronics Association (producers of CES) are still using vCal, and worse that it gets billed as iCal when only Outlook iCal is likely to be speaking that dialect.

I wonder if it's possible to use simple search-and-replace commands in Notepad to make the CES calendar work in Google Calendar. I'm going to try. But all the time, I will be wondering, after this year of cloud computing, how come the top U.S. technology show doesn't support the top cloud calendar format?

Update: If one views the source code of the CES Web site, it's obvious that it is created using the /Microsoft ASP.net format. The incompatibility culprit here is Microsoft!